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Chapter 3: Ecstatic All the Way

The first question:

Osho,Would you please say something on the following words of the poet, Kahlil Gibran: “When love beckons to you, follow him. Love possesses not nor would it be possessed, for love is sufficient unto love. Love has no desire but to fulfill itself.”

Kahlil Gibran is a poet, but not a mystic. A poet is a dreamer, a mystic is a visionary, and the difference is vast. The difference is not only of quantity but of quality. The poet looks not at the moon but at the reflection of the moon in the troubled waters of the lake. He gets a few glimpses here and there, but they are only glimpses and very vague. His perception is not clear, cannot be, because he has not passed through the alchemical process of meditation.

The mind is there between him and the reality, and the mind always interprets; it is a constant commentator. It never allows the reality to reach to you as it is. It distorts it, it polishes it, it changes it. It makes it according to its own gestalt, its own pattern. It gives it the shape of its own ideas, it colors it. Of course, something of the reality still lingers on, but it is only something fragmentary, as if the poet has seen a beautiful dream.

The mystic knows it directly, immediately; there is no interpretation. Existence and the mystic are in deep communion. The poet is only once in a while in a sort of communication, but never of communion. In communication you remain separate, bridged for the moment but still separate. In communion you are no more, not only bridged for the moment - you are simply not there. It is not a question of creating a bridge, you are immersed, you are attuned. You are in a state of “at-onement” with reality.

Remember this, before we start meditating on these beautiful words of Kahlil Gibran - they are beautiful. He is one of the most perceptive poets of this age, but he is a poet, not a mystic; he is not a buddha, not a christ. He has not seen reality, he has dreamed about it. His dreams are beautiful, psychedelic, but dreams are dreams; even if sometimes they reflect the reality, they only reflect it. They are faraway echoes, or maybe echoes of the echoes of the echoes.